From the Salmon

By most people’s standards, I’m tall.

I’m 6’3”. Actually, I’m a fraction shorter than that, but there’s nothing wrong with rounding up, right?

As such, I suffer from something my wife and I have taken to calling “Tall Person’s Guilt.” Some of you already know what I mean.

Let me give you an example.

My wife and I enjoy going to concerts. We don’t go to as many as we used to, but we still love live music. Now, I may be tall, but my wife is a full foot shorter than I am.  So when we’re going to a show that isn’t a sitdown affair, we often try to get there on the early side so we can stand close to the stage. For her benefit, you understand. (Somewhere, she’s rolling her eyes at me.) Not that I don’t enjoy being up close, but this means that I become That Guy You Hate. I know this because I hear you cursing me when you end up behind me. And to a degree, I feel bad that I’m ruining your concert experience. Often, I get pretty self-conscious about it.

That’s Tall Person’s Guilt.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a bit of a run-in with this phenomenon at Tuesday’s Red Sox-A’s game.

We were seated in the upper deck, a bit to the third-base side. When something exciting happened, people around me and people in front of me stood up. I suppose this doesn’t really help anybody see the game better, but it’s part of getting caught up in the moment. It’s a physical response to anticipated elation. Anyhow, I responded similarly in those moments. Sometimes it was because the people in front of me stood up, so I needed to follow suit if I was to have a prayer of seeing the action. Other times, as a fan of the away team, I stood on my own.

Normally, this would be perfectly acceptable activity. It was certainly fine at the Monday night game. But as I rose to celebrate on Tuesday, I heard grumbling from a few rows behind me, sometimes even yelling. I didn’t look behind me until after the final out of the game when I rose to cheer and to high-five the Sox fans in the vicinity. Only then did it become crystal clear that the yelling was directed at me.

I turned to discover that there was an elderly woman sitting three rows behind me who, let’s say, didn’t quite have the leg muscles and reaction time that I did. I made eye contact with her slightly younger companion, who proceeded to tell me loudly and creatively exactly what she thought of me.

Look, I can sympathize with the woman behind me. And perhaps I should have been a little more alert to what was going on around me. But I don’t know that I did anything particularly unusual for a ballgame. Yet two days later, I still feel kinda bad.

Tall Person’s Guilt.

What I would like to explain to the folks behind me is that it’s not my fault. I come from a tall people. You see, the average adult Dutch male is 6’1”, only slightly shorter than I.

But I’d also like to think that I could give these people hope. Well, not them exactly — they’re pretty much done. But the truth is, us Dutch folks weren’t always this tall.

An article in The New Yorker last year told an interesting tale about this relative change in height:

The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world. The men now average six feet one — seven inches taller than in van Gogh’s day — and the women five feet eight.... From Rotterdam to Eindhoven, ceilings have had to be lifted, furniture redesigned, lintels raised to keep foreheads from smacking them. Many hotels now offer twenty-centimetre bed extensions, and ambulances on occasion must keep their back doors open, to allow for patients’ legs.

Fascinatingly enough, it was the United States that used to lay claim to the tallest population. Yet the article indicates that, as a people, Americans haven’t grown taller in over fifty years, while Europeans have grown two centimetres a decade and several Asian populations have grown even faster.

What’s the explanation for these trends? Well, a new group of “anthropometric historians” has come up with some theories. Obviously, height is to some extent genetically determined. But it is also affected by a healthy diet (particularly in infancy) and access to health care. John Komlos, the father of anthropometric history, believes that one of the most promising correlations is between height and GNP, particularly when GNP growth is spread somewhat equally throughout a population. But that may be bad news for the US:

As America’s rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction, Komlos and others say. The eight million Americans without a job, the forty million without health insurance, the thirty-five million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they’re not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller.

On second thought, maybe there’s not a whole lotta hope here for the diminutive among us. But it’s still interesting. And at least I’m nicer than, say, Randy Newman.